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Depending on what authority you ask, our planet contains from 190 to 206 sovereign states. But there are really only two kingdoms: the kingdom of the world and the kingdom of God (also called the kingdom of heaven in the Gospel of Matthew; the Kingdom of Christ and God in Ephesians 5:5; the Kingdom of the Son of his love in Colossians 1:13; and the eternal Kingdom of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ in 2 Peter 1:11). At the end of this article, I have a chart showing the differences between the two kingdoms. You will see that they are so different that they should never be confused.

In the New Testaments of most English Bibles, the words “church” and “churches” appear a total of over one hundred times. (From now on, I will use “church” to stand for both the singular and plural.) With one exception in the King James Version (found in Acts 19:37), all of these instances of “church” are mistranslated from the Greek word ekklēsia. (Unless I am quoting a portion of Greek text, I will use the lexical form ekklēsia.) That’s right, I said mistranslated. Not only that, they are a deliberate mistranslation of ekklēsia. The fact that this mistranslation is so widespread and that it is deliberate should cause us to suspect that it is important to know what ekklēsia really means. In this article, I am going to tell you the origins of the word “church” and its meaning, what ekklēsia means and how it was used in history and the Bible, what Jesus meant by His ekklēsia, why ekklēsia was deliberately mistranslated as “church”, and why all of this is important.